How awesome is Debora Iyall, lead singer of 80s post-punk group Romeo Void? Pretty fucking awesome, if you ask me. But see for yourself:

I love Pandora’s blurb on Romeo Void:

Thanks to the reductive onslaught of the “’80s party weekend” radio format and the numbing similarity of most ’80s hits compilations, hearing the name Romeo Void instantly conjures up the phrase “I might like you better if we slept together” in most minds. The unforgettable chorus of their best-known song, 1981′s “Never Say Never,” the phrase on its own makes the song sound like some kind of shock-value novelty, and indeed, that’s probably how many people remember it. Yet a careful listen to the verses, with their intimations of incest, murder, homelessness, and other dark subjects, makes plain that singer/lyricist Debora Iyall has more on her mind than simple salaciousness. The combination of Iyall’s powerful vocals and searing imagery with the band’s muscular blend of Joy Division’s atmospherics and the Gang of Four’s rattling momentum, with Benjamin Bossi’s splattering free jazz saxophone coloring everything, made Romeo Void one of the strongest of the American post-punk bands.

I personally was so awed by Romeo Void the first time I saw this video on Video Rock (any Delaware Valley people remember this show? It came on at 11 or 11:30 on weeknights and used Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” as a theme, over which a woman breathlessly intoned “It’s wild! It’s hot! It’s Video Rock!” Because back in the early 80s, videos totally WERE wild and hot!) that I quickly formed a totally useless band with some of my junior high classmates called Vandals of the Void, after the Harlan Ellison short story that I am pretty sure I have to this day never read.